Eugenie Lee is a Korean born visual artist based in Sydney. Her works focus on the human body and mind, and in particular chronic pain.
Over a decade of managing endometriosis and adenomyosis, Lee understands the complex relationships between the biological, psychological, and social factors of the illness. Based on this knowledge, Lee engages and interprets scenarios to communicate the highly private nature of pain through visual narratives in paintings, sculptures, and installations.
Her works strive to reconcile objective medical science with the subjective views of patients, inspired by recent neuroscience’s finding that pain is complicated by each individual’s perceptions and meanings.
Lee steadfastly searches for various ways to bring the two perspectives together, so that the issues faced by chronic pain sufferers can be better comprehended by the wider community, regardless of their background.
In 2014 Lee received a grant, supported by Amplify Your Art, a devolved funding program administered by Accessible Arts on behalf of the NSW Government through Arts NSW and Ageing, Disability and Home Care. This grant has given her the opportunity to closely work with a pain science team in Adelaide and Sydney, under Professor Lorimer Moseley.
By gathering stories from pain patients, whose voices are often undervalued in pain treatments, and combining this with the latest pain research she aims to create accurately informed and knowledge based artworks.
Lee has been exhibiting since 2002 through selected galleries and prizes in Sydney and Melbourne, and has recently completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts majoring in sculpture, installation and performance. Her works are collected internationally in UK, USA, Russia, Germany, Korea and Australia.
You can see an example of Eugenie’s work entitled ‘Attached to my Adhesion’ at the following link:
http://eugenielee.com/example-gallery-2/attached-to-my-adhesion/
Eugenie describes the ideas behind the painting in the words below:
This small-scale self-portrait painting primarily shows the psychological experience of chronic pain. The room set-up, a domestic interior motif which appears in many of my paintings, symbolises an internal body or the interiority of a person. The painting communicates my own personal psychodrama within the enclosed domestic space.
I am shown in this work wearing either a traditional Korean petticoat or funeral dress. In my paintings I often interchange between the Korean petticoat and the funeral dress as they are not only similar in colour and cut; both also stand for a state of vulnerability. A woman in her petticoat in public is considered absolutely taboo in Korean custom as the utmost private moment is exposed. A funeral dress is a symbolic representation of the act of mourning for a loss – for someone who was cherished or for something precious. In this painting, I am wearing only the bottom half of the dress to portray the feeling of incompleteness as a person, a woman, a mother and a friend. The ambiguous pose here gives the impression that I am stifled by what I am witnessing in front of me.
The large bonsai tree standing next to the figure relies on the outside source, the water, to maintain its vitality. Many questions arise from this; ‘what if this water stops flowing, then what will happen to the tree?’, ‘what if the water changes to something more harmful, then what will happen to the tree?’, ‘what if the water is not water at all, what if it’s something toxic, what will then happen to the tree?’. Thus it represents the cycle of anxious and fearful thoughts.
From outside of the window a visceral substance is creeping in, sticking onto the objects in the room. Whether systematically or arbitrarily, it’s hard to say. On the other hand the image of the dragon seems to thrive on this red substance, as if the dragon is encouraging its presence in the room. Every element inside this room, whether it’s beneficial or detrimental, clearly seems at home in this environment, and some, like the tree and the image of the dragon, are even flourishing.